This article explains why historians of Latin America have been disinclined to engage with global history, and how global history has yet to successfully integrate Latin America into its debates. It analyses research patterns and identifies instances of parallel developments in the two fields, which have operated until recently in relative isolation from one another, shrouded and disconnected. It outlines a framework for engagement between Latin American history and global history, focusing particularly on the significant transformations of the understudied nineteenth century. It suggests that both global history and Latin American history will benefit from recognition of the existing work that has pioneered a path between the two, and from enhanced and sustained dialogue.

Between 1572 and 1575, a man named Diego litigated for his freedom from slavery in several Spanish courts. Identified as an Indio (Indian), he claimed to have been born in the Spanish territory of Liampo (now Ningbo), China, and later carried on a Spanish ship to Mexico, and eventually to Seville. His master, the cleric Juan de Morales, asserted that he had bought Diego in Portuguese Goa and taken him to Mozambique and to Lisbon before finally bringing him to Seville. At issue was whether Diego was a Portuguese or Spanish imperial subject, since Spanish law strictly prohibited the enslavement of Indios in Spanish territories, while Portuguese laws did not. As witnesses (several of them former slaves from disparate locations including Panama, Lima, Goa, Mozambique, and China) tried to determine Diego’s imperial status, not only did they reveal their comparative fantasies about Portuguese or Spanish landscapes, but they also embedded their own diasporic tales of liminality and loss into Diego’s. Here is the ultimate example of the Indio experience in Castile: an attempt to affix imperial boundaries to a construct that was, in itself, a metaphor for how the rapidly changing globe was imagined, experienced, and compartmentalized. The use of the increasingly amorphous cultural label ‘Indio’ in Castile was symptomatic of tensions between imperial regimes’ desire to constitute and reify themselves as bounded entities and the global mobilities of some of the most marginalized subjects who informed those processes.

Ginger smuggled out of Asia flourished on the Caribbean islands of Hispaniola and Puerto Rico during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The oriental root, whose migration and transplantation Spanish sovereigns sought to stimulate, enjoyed more of a market in England and the Low Countries than in Castile. A differentiated demand for ginger in northern and southern Europe, documented in archival and literary sources, reflected the principles of humoral medicine and influenced trade. Ginger’s poor adaptation to the Spanish fleet system, exacerbated by armed conflicts, including the revolt of the Low Countries (1568–1648) and the Anglo-Spanish War (1585–1604), fomented rather than inhibited a continuum of prohibited practices from privateering to contraband, with English and Dutch merchant-privateers in the ‘Spanish’ Caribbean interested in ginger, sugar, and hides, among other commodities.

Inspired by C. A. Bayly’s notion of global uniformities, this article investigates the different ways in which elitist non-Western music reformers, often with state support, canonized and institutionalized modern national music traditions during the age of liberalism and empire. As these non-Western music reformers reinterpreted liberal and earlier Enlightenment ideas, they envisaged their own musics hierarchically in comparison with Western music. In the context of comparative musicological thinking, they became particularly preoccupied with the systematization of scales, equal temperament tuning, and the origins of their own music. In the process, they often incorporated claims about authenticity and spirituality in music to give strength to burgeoning national, if not anti-imperial, identities. However, beneath the appearance of formal similarity and mutual translatability of non-Western national musics, significant sonic and cultural differences remained. As a contribution to global history scholarship, the article principally attempts to establish these global parallels and comparisons.

This article focuses on Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s theory of colonization, on Karl Marx’s response to it, and on the role that settler colonialism as a global phenomenon played in shaping their thought. Marx’s rejoinder to Wakefield’s interpretation of an episode in the early colonization of Western Australia, when servants had deserted a wealthy colonist, was a foundational moment in the development of his general argument. Wakefield’s reaction to that episode was to develop the theory of ‘systematic colonization’, which he also proposed as an antidote to the prospect of impending revolution. Marx’s notion of primitive accumulation was entwined with his reading of Wakefield’s project. We argue that their different approaches to colonization, the prospect of settling ‘empty lands’ in other continents, can be seen as the starting points of two different political traditions. While revolutionary traditions are well known, this article outlines another global tradition, a political tradition that refuses reaction and revolution equally, and envisages displacement as the best method to produce social transformation.

Following the First World War, nationalists in several parts of the British empire amplified their calls for greater self-government. Activists in Egypt, India, and Ireland portrayed themselves as representatives of movements for national self-determination. Their opponents countered that religious divisions undermined these groups’ claims to nationhood, making the presence of an outside power necessary to protect minorities. Activists formed networks and positioned themselves as parts of a worldwide anti-imperialist movement. Their opponents used these ties in attempts to portray separatist movements as foreign-inspired and socialist. Irish republicans and their global counterparts also struggled with accusations of sectarianism as they advanced their independence claims. This article examines Irish republicans’ connections with international revolutionaries. The confluence of political and religious identities there and in other parts of the British empire provided a pretext for continued imperial engagement. Partition forced nationalists to adjust to new geographic and demographic realities in their post-independence states.